before. Antoine extricates his loot, wedged behind his belt. With a theatrical gesture, he holds out the book. Félix appears horrified. He doesn’t want to touch the paperback, as if it were contaminated. At once Antoine feels an attraction for this boy who is staring at him with his very dark round eyes. He puts de Beauvoir’s book back under his shirt, buttons his coat, and invites his new friend to a restaurant, Le Top, that has just opened on the roof of a furniture store, a surprising new arrival in Chicoutimi. He really wants to know this exotic type who flaunts moral values to the point of indignation at petty shoplifting.
Antoine plies him with questions on his view of the world and his beliefs. Before long, Félix is telling him about the monk Thích Quảng Đức.
“His heart was found intact in the calcified remains of his body.”
“How can you believe such a thing?”
“To me it’s organic, physiological proof which is spiritual as well, that matter dialogues with the spirit. Just now when we’re talking peacefully in this café, do you know what’s going on? Billions of events. Antoine, it’s enough to think of one’s body as an antenna, a radar if you prefer, to enter into contact with the whole universe. And the universe for me is not the cosmos. The universe is everything that has to do with humankind.”
“That’s nonsense. The universe, the cosmos, are the same thing.”
“No they aren’t. But that doesn’t really matter. What matters is what connects humans. It hardly matters what they think, what they do. People are connected. No one can escape the universal connection. What happens if you and I, at the very moment when the waitress tucks away a lock of hair and the client sitting on our left gets up to pay, if we open our eyes, our ears, our hearts, and send our consciousness out to listen to the universe like an enormous radar?”
“Lots of things, I imagine.”
“Exactly. But above all, we’re astonished. See, you put sugar in your coffee and at that very moment American soldiers are slaughtering Vietnamese children in their villages. I put milk in mine and in Washington, young people like us are demonstrating against Nixon. They’re beaten with clubs, they’re dragged through the mud by armed policemen. Young people like us are thrown in jail.”
“What should we do? Organize a demonstration against the war in Vietnam here in Chicoutimi, or stop drinking coffee?”
“I’m trying to make you understand what I mean by ‘universe.’ Do you know that right now there’s a cholera epidemic in Bangladesh?”
“No …”
“Well there is, a terrible epidemic. And when we’ve finished our coffees there’ll be a thousand or maybe even ten thousand more victims. Whole villages where the corpses are dumped into stinking pits. Men with gas masks over their mouths suffocate in the acrid smoke from the pyres they’ve lit to burn the victims’ furniture and clothes. That must be how it happens. Like the plague, d’you see? Radar, Antoine. No one can escape. And the heart of Thích Quảng Đức, in my opinion, is just that: the absolute act condensed into one muscle. Something that no one can explain, can comprehend. Because explaining and comprehending mean nothing when you’re dealing with a … a … I can’t come up with a word for it. The same as for music. Must we explain, must we understand music? No. Music is what most resembles the heart of Thích Quảng Đức. Something that acts in the whole universe but we aren’t able to explain or comprehend it. Do you understand?”
“Are you a Buddhist?”
“Not at all. I believe in Christ.”
“So why are you talking non-stop about this Thích Quảng Thing and his fireproof heart? I don’t see what you’re getting at.”
“Do you think I know myself? Lots of things escape me. I may be the one person who knows the least about myself.”
“When did it happen?”
“What?”
“That business of the suicide by fire.”
“On June 11, 1963. I can give you all the details if you want. I did a paper on it. The teacher asked us to write a dissertation on a person who had changed the world with one simple act. He wouldn’t let us choose Christ or people like Hitler, Napoleon, or Nero. He wanted us to dig around, waste hours in the library. So then I remembered that photo. I was nine when I spotted it in a newspaper.”
“The oldest event I remember is the assassination of Kennedy. On that day I lost my virginity.”
Félix freezes. His gaze clouds over. Antoine has just surprised him, maybe even scandalized him. He savours the brief moment when you think you can hear the heartbeat of the person facing you.
“Yes, my virginity,” Antoine resumes. “Just not the one you’re thinking about. See, JFK’s assassination was an event that cut my life in two. When I saw my mother in the living room, crying in front of the TV, I realized that something serious had happened. In her eyes, the president’s assassin was the devil incarnate come back to earth. The world had just appeared in our living room. The end of childhood. That day I lost my innocence, and I understood one essential thing: evil exists.”
“Then you believe in the devil?”
A wave of pleasure crosses Antoine’s face.
“No, Félix. Genuine evil is something else.”
Chapter 3
Why does he work himself into such a state? Antoine waits nervously for the journalist’s arrival. He has vacuumed the living room and cleared up the dirty dishes in the kitchen. Claire Langlois arrives on time. He figures that she’s at most twenty-five. He shows her into the living room, offers coffee. She comments on the paintings on the walls. Finds them interesting. Whenever someone describes something as interesting he forms two conflicting hypotheses: either the thing in question is worthless or the person who drops the hollow remark knows nothing about the thing in question. Antoine grows tense. Still, he can’t help commenting on the young woman’s dress. Elegant. He’s just paid her a compliment. The journalist tackles the first question:
“We know that Alice Livingston liked to surprise her readers. She had a gift for creating banal situations that start slipping imperceptibly toward dark, tormented zones. Her characters, at first so approachable, I mean, so much like us, always end up taking on complex meanings. Did Alice resemble her characters?”
Langlois’s question surprises him. Banal, yes, he agrees with that. His wife’s novels exploit the banality of feelings, the well-oiled delicate machinery of minor dramas. He believes sincerely that in a few minutes he could jot on a scrap of paper the quintessence of an umpteenth novel by Alice: a woman, happy, beautiful and desirable, a professional, with a husband and children, dies of cancer when she has just taken a lover. Question: would the woman have survived if she hadn’t cheated on her husband? Or even more mundane: a happy man with wife and children, a prominent and sought-after profession, a hefty bank account, dies in a plane crash when he is on his way to meet another, younger woman. Question: was he really happy? Antoine often wondered why his wife didn’t write for television, the ideal planet for her characters.
“Was Alice Livingston anything like her characters?”
The journalist has just repeated her question. Why should he tell this young woman the truth? Why should he share her life story with a stranger
